Tax Credit Advisor Article Archives

Each year since 2004, NH&RA has bestowed its Affordable Housing Vision Award to affordable housing and community development leaders who have made significant and valuable contributions to the field and demonstrated years of leadership, commitment and imagination.

In our office, in addition to publishing Tax Credit Advisor, we manage organizations that address the needs of aging Americans. This has inspired me to be a collector of stories about creative aging solutions, including many in housing. Some of my favorites—including MetaHousing’s Arts Colonies, senior housing that contains art studios, music studios and theaters, and the Actors Fund residences where people get to spend later life with others with whom they shared an occupation—have been covered previously in these pages.

Last month, NH&RA’s Developers Council submitted comments to the National Council of State Housing Agencies (NCSHA) in response to its new proposed recommended practices in housing credit allocation and underwriting. It is to the credit of NCSHA and its members that as the LIHTC program and marketplace has evolved, it has dedicated significant time and effort to developing revised guidelines for its members to coincide with the times.

The Pacific Companies, headquartered in the bucolic community of Eagle, Idaho, has developed 10,000 units of multifamily housing over its 20-year existence—90 percent of it affordable—in some of the remotest parts of the western United States as well as in its largest urban centers.

Is far as scientists know, light is the fastest-moving entity in the universe. And now, harnessing the energy provided by our only significant light source, 92.6 million miles away, is the fastest-moving technology to provide for our future power needs.

By the 1950s, the Savannah home was one of 52 Little Sisters of the Poor locations in the U.S. With nursing home regulations and mandated safety codes of the 1960s, these homes were facing expensive renovations or, more commonly, outright closure.

It can feel as overwhelming as combining algebra and physics into one class. Both affordable housing and assisted living are vital solutions to the issues faced by aging Americans, but they are also each extremely complicated to develop and manage.

At a time when large developers matter because of their impacts on cities, LDS should be a bigger part of America’s urbanist conversation.

Just as U.S. cities have become bastions of disparity, so too are their neighborhoods. Particularly in this era of spatial dispersion, when rich people settle in centrally-located areas and poor people in the suburbs, it isn’t hard to pick out the right and wrong sides of town.

Just to our north lies a country whose population, eight percent less than California’s, is spread out over a land two percent larger than America, a country whose dominant language is the same as ours, and whose housing challenges are a refracted mirror image of ours at home, with fragments that are like ours but assembled in configurations entirely different from ours.

It can be difficult to keep tabs on the strategies that housing finance agencies are utilizing in their Qualified Allocation Plans (QAP) to meet local housing needs since they vary from state-to-state.

“Given the need for more Affordable Assisted Living, Wallick Communities decided to bring its 50 years of affordable housing expertise together with its 30 years of assisted living experience to create The Ashford: our Affordable Assisted Living community.”